About language, identity & play.
Meaning and sense are born out of our interaction with others. Through it we build an image of ourselves, of our identity. By sharing a common code, our language and all it can transmit, we recognize ourselves as being part of something larger than the individual.
Play, as an act of creativity, allows for metamorphosis and interaction. It permits the articulation of seemingly opposites into something new, something with an identity of its own. It doesn’t deny differences and underlying tensions. Rather, it opens up the possibility of multiplicity by overcoming pre-established boundaries, bringing forth originality and uniqueness.
Language is acknowledgement and perception of being. As we explore the pre-established map it lays before us, and use the logic of imagination, we stretch the limits of communication to encounter uncertainty and ambiguity: that which is foreign to us. We enter a world full of new possible meanings, of multiple senses and identities.
Without avoiding paradoxes, without expecting to find “truth”, we can explore and create a new code. We can search for an enhanced way of sharing and communicating. One that will allow us to inhabit metaphors, the plurality of who we are, and the plurality we can become.
(August 2005)
